Chuck Hamburg has spent the last 39 years in the restaurant industry as an educator, operator and consultant and has lectured on Hospitality Management in over 30 countries worldwide. He was literally born in the restaurant business. His father, an entertainer in the Big Band Era who retired from show business after WWII, bought a wholesale meat business in Boston, had a son, and named him Chuck as a publicity stunt.

He grew up working in his father’s business as well as operating food concessions at Fenway Park, Harvard Stadium and Boston Garden. His real interest in the culinary world was peaked in the early 60s while volunteering in high school as a food gopher for Julia Child on her T.V. show, “The French Chef.”

Upon graduating from University of Massachusetts in 1969, he worked for two years for The Hotel Corporation of America in Food and Beverage Management at the Plaza Hotel in New York, the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. and the Hotel Vendome in Beirut, Lebanon.

His teaching career started in 1971 at Bryant & Stratton College in Boston and in 1974 he moved to Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he was the Hotel and Restaurant Program Director until 1980, followed by four years running his own consulting firm and operating 3 restaurants in Faneuil Hall in Boston. He spent the next three years as Hospitality Director at the New York Institute of Technology in Manhattan and Long Island, where he consulted on several developing vineyards in Long Island, and with many of Atlantic City Casino Restaurants. In 1987 he became the first Director of the Manfred Steinfeld Program in Hospitality Management in Chicago, where he led the program until 1993, when he stepped down to teach in the program on a full-time basis and start a consulting company.The program now has 200 majors studying Hotel, Restaurant, Culinary and Meeting Planning Management. In 1995 he helped develop a Masters curriculum that is now the largest Hospitality Masters Program in the country.

Previously, Professor Hamburg had owned and managed restaurants in Harvard Square, Nantucket, and Boston, and his consultancies included Faneuil Hall in Boston, South Seaport in New York, Bay Front in Miami, Casino de Monte-Carlo, Monaco and Hyatt Gaming Corporation. During the summers from 1987 to 1999 he developed American style restaurants in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany while working as a visiting Professor in Restaurant Management at the César Ritz School in Bouveret, Switzerland as well as serving as a food and beverage consultant to the famed Montreux Jazz Festival.

He is a past Board Member of The Massachusetts Restaurant Association, The Illinois Restaurant Association, The National Restaurant Association, as well as past President of the Illinois Chapter of Hotel and Restaurant Educators. In 1993 he was co-chairman of the World Hospitality Conference held in Chicago. Currently, in addition to his teaching duties, his consulting company, Creative Hospitality Associates, is developing several restaurants in the Chicago area as well as teaching F.A.S.T. (Fundamental Alcohol Safety Training) a program they developed for the state which gives BASSET Certification while teaching this to the restaurants of Chicago. Because of his background in Casino Management, which included lecturing at UNLV, and currently teaching gaming for the past 15 years at Roosevelt University, he is actively involved as a consultant to operators in the states’ new video gaming law as well as a proponent of a new Chicago Downtown casino.Professor Hamburg earned his BS degree in Hotel Management at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, his Master of Education in Guidance and Counseling at Suffolk University in Boston and pursued Doctoral work in Wine and Beverage Marketing at the University of Marseilles in France.He resides in Rogers Park in Chicago .

Major Highlights & Accomplishments

The first Director of the Manfred Steinfeld Program in Hospitality Management in Chicago